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ALIEN: RESURRECTION

Written by Joss Whedon. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Michael Wincott, Dan Hedaya, Brad Dourif.

I ragged on this film pretty thoroughly in the May edition of the SPEW page, claiming I'd have previewed the script if I could only remember where I'd thrown it in disgust. Well... I found it. And I decided to give it another reading, fearing that my initial reaction was hasty and overly negative. I also admit to having doubts raised by the reaction of others who've read this script and liked it. So, thinking I may have missed something, I plunged ahead.

And it's still lousy.

But! Not as absolutely unredeemable as I originally thought. See, this time I was able to get past my initial, knee-jerk reaction of "I don't care about any of the characters - especially Ripley", and focus on what Whedon was trying to accomplish. This script is all about what it means to be human - in the best and worst meanings of the word. It's about Ripley coming to grips with whatever humanity is still inside her, and Call (Winona Ryder's character) trying to preserve it against all odds - from within and without.

There's bad news and good news. The bad news is Ripley's part alien.
The good news? At least she's got all her hair.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, here's a quickie plot synopsis. There's a science vessel on the outskirts of our solar system, on which scientists have cloned Ripley (after seven failed attempts) and a bunch of aliens. Smugglers arrive. Your typical motley crew. One of them is Call, who is different from the rest in some vague, hard-to-define way (aside from the fact that she's Winona Ryder and cute as a button). Ripley, in the cloning process, has absorbed some of the alien DNA, which mixes with her human DNA (near as I could figure) to make her super-strong, super-confused, and super-weirded out. Call sneaks into Ripley's cell to try and kill her. Call is caught. There is much shouting and finger-pointing, during which the aliens suddenly get smart and figure out a way to escape (actually this is pretty funny - there are three in a cell, and two rip the third apart, escaping when its blood seeps through the floor). Now it's a long chase from one end of the science vessel to the cargo bay containing the smugglers' ship and their only chance for escape. Add in the fact that the science vessel is returning to Earth and will arrive in three hours. Add in the fact that Call is not really human but a very sophisticated robot. Add in the fact that the science vessel hasn't enough energy left to be blown up (huh?) so it must be crashed into Earth in order to destroy the aliens breeding rapidly within. Add in an astonishing amount of blood and guts and viola! One ALIEN movie, coming up.

The script really is one long chase once the aliens escape. And that's what I didn't like when I first read it. It was scene after scene of people blasting aliens, aliens munching people, alien blood eating through the hull of the ship... repeat until 120 pages are filled. It was basically FRIDAY THE 13th in space. In other words - it was like ALIEN3.

But on second reading I realize I was wrong. ALIEN: RESURRECTION does indeed have something other than blood and guts on its mind - it wants us to consider the nature of humanity, and what struggles we're willing to go through to preserve it. Ripley battles the aliens from both inside and outside, trying to come to grips with this new version of herself. Add in the character of Call, a robot with more human feelings and emotions than the smugglers she's taken up with, and the script tries to provide a thoughtful undercurrent to all the wild action. Unfortunately, I still don't think it works.

Sigourney proves that, even though she's been out of the
action movie arena, she can still fight her way out of a paper bag!

I don't think it works because Ripley spends the entire script looking for her humanity, unable to find it until the end (and then only in actions, not emotions). There's a basic problem to this concept - the strength of ALIEN and ALIENS was Ripley's humanity. Her strength of character, her will to survive, and through it all her ability to remain identifiable and sympathetic. All that is gone here. Now she's a brooding, super-strong, half-alien shell of herself, containing none of the life force from the first two films (let's not even discuss the third one, okay?). All this intellectual 'struggle to regain her humanity' subplot accomplishes is to make the film sound like it's about more than it really is... and to ultimately rob Ripley of what made her such a great character in the first place.

To be fair, there are a lot of fun things - action-wise - in this screenplay. Heck, if it wasn't an ALIEN script, I'd probably cut it a little more slack. But for every cool thing, there's some really dopey thing to counter it. Like the dialog. There's some great dialog, like this exchange between one of the smugglers and Ripley as they attempt to evade the aliens:

JOHNER
You've come up against these things before?

RIPLEY
Yes.

JOHNER
So what'd you do?

RIPLEY
Died.

But for every cool exchange like that there's a line like this:

CALL
You're a limp fucking scrotum, you know that?

Poetry. Actually, I included that line because I read someone else's review of this script, and THAT'S the line they picked to indicate how GOOD the dialog was. No sarcasm - they thought it was one of the best lines in the script. Sadly enough, they may be right.

MY PROGNOSIS? It'll have tons of action, boast Sigourney back in the role of Ripley, add in the novelty of Winona (LITTLE WOMEN) Ryder in a shoot-em-up movie, and harvest some of the good will sown by the first two films in the series. But it'll also have to deal with the still festering resentment many fans feel toward ALIEN3, and if the initial word of mouth isn't great it'll probably be a mid-level hit, but nothing spectacular.

VARIETY: "Fox tiptoes into weird Freudian areas and moments of grotesquerie that are new even to this series... The film is a generally cold - though sometimes wildly imaginative and surprisingly jokey - $70 million scarefest that may prove too mixed a meal to scare up monstrous business among mass audiences... The movie is held back by a lack of emotional engagement at its center and a pottage of half-assimilated, European-flavored quirks... Popular acclaim looks likely to fall somewhere between the low of ALIEN3 and high of James Cameron's ALIENS... As a series of action set pieces, the movie is frequently gripping and always highly watchable... Whedon's script injects some of the rough, testosterone humor of ALIENS into a story that tries to build on the cross-species subtext of ALIEN3. However, when the movie strays into weirder territory - where, one feels, (director) Jeunet's heart really lies - there's a growing feeling of inadequacy. Pic's interest in Ripley's split, half-human personality and her maternal bond with the Queen leads to some of the most intriguing - and cheesiest - stuff in the picture, but overall come off more as exotic inserts than fully assimilated sequences... It's almost as if the pic is afraid to enter the darkened rooms whose doors it keeps opening, though if it had, a truly original movie could have resulted. As it is, the finished film shows many signs of creative push and pull - Whedon's original script was extensively changed during production - from unexplained ellipses in the plot's early stages, through dialog that is surprisingly jokey and unelevated (considering the themes that play), to a storyline that seems unwilling to stray far from the action... In addition, the key relationship in the picture, between Ripley and Call, has little chance to realize its potential and provide a badly needed emotional hook for the audience. In every respect, this is a cold movie that, even at the very end, fails to provide the sense of emotional release that the others in the series all managed to deliver."

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